Everyone has a different parenting style that they follow, whether they realize it or not. One woman's gentle parenting approach was working well for her family, but when she went to visit her sister, it all fell apart.
One woman chased away her relatives, claiming that her sister's gentle parenting had made her and her family unhappy.
One woman posted on Reddit about the trouble she got into when her sister's family came to visit.
“My sister and her family — my sister, her husband and their two kids — came to visit my husband and me and stayed at our house for a week,” she explained.
“My sister practices gentle parenting,” she continued. “I'd never heard of gentle parenting before she came to us, probably because my kids are older now and I don't have the knowledge. She explained that gentle parenting is just talking about how you feel, without timeouts or groundings or anything like that.”
This woman didn't really understand the concept of gentle parenting, but was willing to forgo it to appease her sister.
“It seemed like there was no discipline whatsoever, and I thought it was a little odd that they didn't say anything to avoid rocking the boat,” she says, “until I was astounded by the gentle parenting in action.”
The situation quickly deteriorated. “During the first two days of her stay, her daughter wrote on my wall, [a] “Her son uprooted flowers I had just planted in my flower bed and threw rocks at my car while it was parked in the driveway,” she recalled. “To top it off, they both kept pulling my golden retriever's fur and hitting the dog in the face.”
The woman expected there to be consequences for her niece and nephew's actions, but to her surprise, nothing happened.
“I always assumed my sister or her husband would discipline the kids, but they never did, so I did. At least, I tried to,” she said. “If I told my sister's kids to stop or scolded them even a little, she would get mad. She told me it wasn't my role to discipline them.”
But the sisters never tried to discipline anyone themselves: “All she did in every instance was ask, 'How did you feel when you did that?' That was it,” she said.
As the situation worsened, the woman asked her sister and her family to leave the house and live elsewhere.
Gentle parenting falls squarely in the middle of what both sisters were trying to do.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, “The goal of gentle parenting is to raise confident, independent and happy children through empathy, respect, understanding and setting healthy boundaries.”
Gentle Parenting is different from other parenting styles: “Instead of focusing on punishment and reward, Gentle Parenting focuses on increasing children's self-awareness and understanding of their own behavior,” say the researchers.
This woman's sister tried really hard to be a kind parent but it didn't seem to work. Focusing on the child's feelings is important and right, but it's not the only piece of the puzzle.
Gentle parenting doesn't mean never disciplining your child, but rather helping them understand what they've done instead of punishing them automatically.
The sisters' relationship was torn apart by differing views on discipline.
The woman updated her original post to say that her sister somehow found the post and blocked her number. She wrote a heartfelt letter to her sister on Reddit, explaining that she loves her sister but that her children have crossed the line.
For now, it remains to be seen whether their relationship can be repaired.
This could just be one of those instances where two women come to terms with their differences and agree to stay in a hotel when they visit.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a YourTango writer covering entertainment, news, and human interest topics.
